Higher education and student loans. It all seems pretty messed up. :/ Pages PREV 1 2 3 NEXT | |
I like the way our system in Australia works. Our tertiary education has caps on the maximum cost depending on the degree, using a band system. Ranging from $5k to $9k. Until recently there was also a National Priorities section that included Math and the Sciences that only cost $4.5k but the government got rid of that. On top of capped fees students do not have to start paying back the debt until they begin to earn above a certain amount of money. When they do then they simply have an amount deducted towards paying their debt, pretty much like tax. $44k is the minimum amount at the moment, at which point you start paying 4%, increasing to 8% by $83k+. There is no interest on the debt. The system is essentially funded by overseas students, mostly from Asia. Overseas students are required to pay fees in full. The fees depend on the Uni but typically they are around 3x more than what an Australia pays. Universities are allowed to set aside a certain amount of places in courses to overseas students. Around 15% of income for Unis are overseas student fees. The "education industry" in Australia is worth around $10 Billion, our 6th largest export. I think the fact that we can make money out of education is the key. If a government looks at education as a cost then it is going to suffer. You have to look at the future benefits of education in terms of future earnings (much like healthcare). On top of that if you can build a system such as ours then you can bring in overseas students, who are a massive boost to the economy. Even better is when after they get their fancy degree you give them permanent residence and instead of going back to their own country to be a doctor or whatever with their fancy degree they stay. It really is a good scheme, especially since as a country we would have severe shortages of professionals without it. | |
Who said anything about ignoring them? Just because they wouldn't receive government funding under my plan doesn't mean they couldn't be funded in other ways. | |
You want to give special privileges and funding to those you believe to be more valuable. I prefer equality all around. In my mind a mediocre engineer is far less valuable to society than a high grade liberal arts student. Stop using government to promote your view of how society should be. | |
Student loans are believed to be the next bubble to pop as they've pretty much an exact replica of the mortgage system that melted down a few years ago. Banks make loans knowing they can be packaged as investment vehicles so they don't care (and fees encourage larger loans) while post secondary institutions get paid anyway so have no incentive to keep loans small or promote specific fields (as one web comic writer put it, you are a little loan with legs.) More debt, lower wages, bubble pops, panic ensues. Financial meltdown aside, I'm surprised there isn't more private involvment in the education system. A small investment in tuition and a little direction could keep people off governent assistance programs, and put people into fields that build and create, not say "do you want fries with that". Of course, god forbid people think ahead of what they'll get from this instead of only thinking about the imediate cash payout. Welcome to the world of ecconomic myopia. Easy solutions? plenty. Desirable ones? Not for the people that are making big bucks at this. I'd probably start with stricter predatory lending laws just to make sure no one is rubber stamping loans for liberal arts degrees. Somehow I think that if the originator (bank) and ultimate recipiant of the loan (the university) were held responsbile for default due to poor job offerings after graduation, there'd be a very quick turnaround in education standards, worth of degrees offered and effort into job placement. | |
What? I thought it was a simple idea without any views promoted: the country faces job shortages in a particular field, they offer incentives to get people to get a degree in that field. | |
The main problem of this is the government's involvement in student loans, even offering them directly to students without regards to the students major, the college they want to go to, or any other information ( http://febp.newamerica.net/background-analysis/federal-student-loan-programs-overview ). THAT is why student loans are almost impossible to be forgiven in bankruptcy. This isn't the banker's predatory loans, why the heck would they want to make these kinds of loans if they didn't have the government to pay it off if it fails? If the government wasn't involved, the banks would loan only to a VERY few number of safe students they KNOW would be able to pay. Trying to make a debt slave out of a person is futile if the person cannot pay the money, that is just going to make you lose what ever money you gave them. | |
He wants more people to be in a particular field because he views that as desirable. He views the idea of having more engineers as desirable while having more (possibly more competent) people in say the field of sociology as being not as desirable. He wants government to further promote his view of what society needs. What are laws and regulations but the promotion of what society views as desirable. We throw people in jail for murder because we view murder as wrong. We levy fines on people who drive over the speed limit because we view it as unsafe. And on. There is not a shortage of engineers in this country. There is a shortage of competent engineers but that is the same in every field. The way to get more competent people is to attract more competent people into the field. Dropping the price in one area will not attract competent people because competent people will usually know what they want to do anyway. Drop the price all around and competent people in all sectors can get an education more easily. You could also deemphasize the necessity of a degree. The owner of LaRue Tactical probably knows more about engineering than your average engineer with a Doctorate. Why? Because while some people were using their money to get a college degree he was out gaining experience in the field. I have not learned anything in college that I either did not need or could not have learned on my own. Unfortunately in my field a person without a degree is almost universally laughed out of the room. | |
Yeah, I'm not doing that at all. I'm a liberal arts graduate. I'm a double major, one of which is in fine arts. I'm not promoting how I think society should be at all. I'm just trying to promote what I have heard employers need but can't find in the US. I have read articles be-moaning the fact that we don't have enough low-level engineers. That's actually one of the reasons Apple says it can't manufacture in the US. The lower cost of labor there is actually less important than the nimbleness of manufacturing companies there. When Steve Jobs wanted a glass screen for his new iPhone, a factory in China set up the manufacturing process within 24 hours. It would have taken weeks for an American company to do the same, which could have de-railed the whole project. In contrast, I've not once heard of a single person talk about not being able to create jobs in the US because there aren't enough people with MAs in comparative literature. | |
I am reporting this post to the moderators because you are outright lying about me, my argument, and my motivation. In doing so you are engaging in personal attacks, which is unacceptable on this board. | |
You're like powder on steroids. Just saying. OT: From what I've seen you're better off just not going to college unless you plan on entering a specialised field, like medicine or something. | |
It's quite obvious (in my country at least) that there is a broad consensus across left and right in political circles as to what university is for: 1) To make people employable and productive Any quaint ideas people have about self-improvement, independent thought, intellectual pursuit, knowledge for the sake of knowledge and so on just don't factor in any more. The government cares about jobs (preferably high-skilled and high pay), and all they want academia for is to be maximally geared at producing good little worker drones in the most profitable areas at minimum cost. | |
Well, with your rather specific mentions of green energy tech and Arabic/Urdu it certainly seemed like you personally had some ideas as to what sectors should be favoured. But it's all good if you're willing to leave it in the hands of economists... to the extent even they can agree on what strategies are needed, it's not like Friedman and Keynes would necessarily agree on how to boost the economy, and hence certain ideas/agendas would inevitably win over others.
I'd rather they served the equal needs of their citizens equally.
Perhaps you would enlighten me as to all the areas other than its oil export where the Middle East is a significant player in global economy?
Well, that's how I'd ideally like it to be, assuming a democratic majority could be found to pass such an act. There's no such will in the US specifically, but I'm talking societies in general. As for opposing your idea, I'll of course oppose measures where the needs of select groups of citizens are served, while the equal needs of other groups are ignored. All citizens are equal before the law, and none am entitled to greater benefits than others whose needs are the same. If the government wishes to entice people to choose a particular education so they can fill certain positions in the military and civil administration, then it can offer such wages for the jobs it need filled that any debt incurred during qualifying for them can easily be paid off. That'll reward those who managed to make it through without much debt too, and ensure that resources aren't wasted on those who don't take/get these government jobs. As for it enticing people to choose a particular education so they can fill certain positions in favoured parts of the private sector, such is no business of the government. Not only are their equal needs served differently, but supporting certain private businesses even means actively harming others, through the introduction of an element of unfair competition. *** Oh, and if I might budge in on an element of that other discussion that's evolved here:
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You think society should have more engineers so you are telling the government to get more engineers by using the law to change the current dynamic. Yes, you are telling us how you think society should be.
As I stated before we have more than enough engineers. What we need are more competent engineers. Although if you are talking about low paying engineering jobs you are right but that has to do with something completely different. We need low tech engineers, employers look more and more at your degree (which means that people like LaRue couldn't get an engineering job), after going through college for 4-6 years you probably do not want to be paid $40,000 a year, many college students don't take the job because they want a better one, end result; loss of low level engineers. In other words the factor that needs to be changed is the entitlement and arrogance that many students have upon leaving college.
That has to do with more efficient companies and structures NOT the presence or absence of more engineers.
I myself have heard plenty of people bemoan the difficulty their company is having trying to startup relations with a Swiss company. In fact that company is heavily recruiting Swiss-German speakers and experts on the region to try and boost relations. There are not that many people in the US who can speak Swiss-German and understand the socio-political morasses of the region. That is where I come in. The thing you do not seem to comprehend is how necessary intellectuals are to building such relations. The Republic of Letters did more to create and build up globalism than the UN ever did.
Personal attacks? Oversensitive much? Anyway you have yet to show how what I said about your argument is wrong. What particular part are you complaining about? | |
I like the system over here in the UK(sorry if someone has already mentioned it) if you have a student loan it doesn't need to be paid off till at least £15 000 is being earned, by which point a decent job or source of income must have been secured, if after 25 years the loan is not paid of entirely it is written off, and the interest rates are low so not much is ever added on, plus the pay back rate is fairly low so not much is taken out with each repayment, overall I would say that is pretty good. | |
Woah woah woah, back up here. I mean, I have an offer from Cambridge Univeristy over here in the UK. But guard emus? Is it too late to change my mind?! D: | |
He doesn't think society should promote anything. My god, are you being difficult. It has nothing to do with engineers. If there was a work shortage in, say, programming then the same thing would apply for programming degrees. He is just saying that the government could offer incentives for people to get a degree in a field that they need workers in. This isn't a difficult thing to understand. | |
You say that but then-
So government (being representative of society) should offer incentives to do something but not promote people to do something. Think about that real quick and read these synonyms from thesaurus.com- Incentive- Synonyms: allurement, bait, carrot, catalyst, come-on, consideration, determinant, drive, encouragement, enticement, excuse, exhortation, goad, ground, impetus, impulse, incitement, influence, insistence, inspiration, instigation, motivation, motive, persuasion, provocation, purpose, rationale, reason, reason why, spring, spur, stimulant, stimulation, stimulus, temptation, urge, whip Promote- Synonyms: advertise, advocate, aid, assist, avail, back, befriend, benefit, bolster, boost, build up*, call attention to, champion, contribute, cooperate, cry*, develop, encourage, endorse, espouse, forward, foster, further, get behind, hype*, improve, nourish, nurture, patronize, plug*, popularize, propagandize, publicize, puff, push, push for, recommend, sell, serve, speak for, speed, sponsor, stimulate, subsidize, succor, support, uphold, urge, work for Or how about these definitions from dictionary.com- incentive promote
Apparently it is since you can't figure out that all you are doing is saying what I said with a slightly different word choice. By incentivizing something you promote it. Why would you incentivize something if you do not what people to do it? English 101 people.
Engineers are my preferred example. Is there any reason why I should not use them as an example or are you just being obtuse?
There is a shortage of competent people everywhere. What exactly makes a programmer more important than a historian? My argument is that the government should not be picking and choosing what degrees to promote. All or none. A mediocre engineer (or programmer if you prefer) does no more good for society than a mediocre historian and does far less good than a great historian. Why exactly should government promote (or incentivize if you prefer) people to get into a career that they won't excel at? | |
A mediocre engineer does a lot more for society when we have a shortage of engineers than a mediocre historian when we are in no shortage of historians. In other words, I reject your premise that a mediocre worker in a field of need isn't any more special than a worker in any other field. | |
i don't think its an either/or question. i think "the humanities" should be paid for by loans. if you think you can make a wage out that stuff it's your gamble. the suggestion should be that the vast majority of "humanities" studies should be conducted part time while in work. but on the other hand i would take the massive data gathering potential we have in modern technology and make other higher education centres focused on providing a workforce for the high end of the economy as required and generating their own start up businesses etc from the work produced in dissertations etc. the cost for those courses would be paid by the state. basically i'd split higher education in collages of two different types and fund them differently however there would be some crossover and agreements would be in place to support various crossover areas of study (for example going to another campus to learn languages in support of a business related degree) | |
Seems to me that if you are going to have severe debt due to going to college, you should just go to a cheaper college, a community college, or otherwise work to get scholarships and grants. University educations shouldn't just be handed out on the basis of "Oh, it's too expensive". Hell, if it's that expensive, enlist in the military and you won't have to worry about it anyways. My rule of thumb has always been that if you rack up massive amounts of debt after doing something, then you weren't supposed to do it in the first place. | |
Problem, we do not have a shortage of engineers. We have a shortage of competent engineers but we also have a shortage of competent historians. In other words we need more competent engineers AND competent historians.
Really? Then why don't you explain to me how a few hundred mediocre engineers will help our current society more than a few hundred mediocre historians. A mediocre engineer makes an error and a bridge falls down, or a design goes over budget, or materials are wasted, etc. A mediocre historian makes an error and a bad book is written, a business deal does not get made, and international incident occurs, school children are traumatized for life, etc. Pumping out more mediocre engineers (or any other group) is not going to help anything. No matter what you think, the fact is that a great writer or historian is far more useful to society than a mediocre engineer. Trying to promote more people into a field does nothing but over saturate it with mediocrity. Look at how well the pharmacy bubble worked out. People call for more pharmacy technicians, people in college go for it, the market gets saturated with pharmacy technicians, the bubble bursts, and people who spent thousands of dollars on that degree cannot get a job in their chosen field. Congrads. | |
well that's just bad planning. there's no excuse for that in todays information age. | |
I appreciate it, but it's not worth the effort. farson135 does not appear interested in reading what I write, but rather in reading what he wishes I had written. | |
So are you going to argue that government (being a representative of society) can incentivize an action without promoting it? Read post 53 for the rest. | |
I think you make a fair point here, but I'm not entirely convinced either. If there are a lot of workers, it's attractive to industry even if many are mediocre. A labour surplus facilitates industry both by ensuring that there will be no problems filling posts, and drive down the cost of employment due to competition. I think you're a bit harsh about mediocrity too: the nature of humanity is that most people are average, so it is an inevitability. You just want to ensure there is excellence as well. Whether with or without government support, education bubbles are inevitable. A degree is undertaken at a young age and normally expected to serve you throughout life. Individuals are still likely to educate themselves for vibrant industries in youth that may decline or collapse long before their working life is over, or simply form a glut that even a vibrant industry cannot meet. I also think that government can make reasonable strategic decisions to support industry including via education. To take something obvious like national defence, it does not serve a country to let itself fill with great authors and then find it has too few engineers when it needs to build weaponry. | |
That is true but the problem arises when there are too many people and not enough posts. More below-
You are missing the point, I do not mind mediocrity as long as it is spread out. Most people cannot do several specialized jobs so if we flood the market with lots of (just using an example) mechanical engineers you will then have specialists that cannot find jobs in their field and because they do not have any training they probably will not be able to pick up another specialty very easily. In other words they are locked in that specific area. Personally I always encourage people to train in many different areas so that they can do many different jobs. Unfortunately most of the students I know mostly can only do what they are taught and because schools do not try to give a variety of training most people are screwed.
You are right but I do not see why we need to build more bubbles.
It can try and fail. The government has no more ability to predict future market trends than what other people tell it. Yes, there as some very smart people out there who work for the government but they are still limited in their ability to predict the future.
Thing is though, that does not happen. As I have been saying we have more than enough engineers. In other words we have plenty of general purpose mediocre engineers and we will continue to pump out enough for the foreseeable future. We would be far better served adjusting the education system so that we can get more competent engineers into the field. I keep mentioning LaRue because that is a self educated man who could not get a job as an engineer but he designs and builds high quality firearms. The country would be far better served if we just changed the education system to a superior version and stopped emphasizing a college degree as the end game. Personally I do not think ME people should even go to college. A trade school combined with real world experience and maybe a little theory thrown in would produce far better engineers than what we have now. And I have gone off topic so I will stop now. | |
Nope. I'm not going to argue anything with you since you persist in trying to tie opinions you disagree with to sinister personal motives. | |
You (personal) want to do something because you think it will help a situation (motive). I have no idea where you got the idea that I thought it was sinister but I suppose it does not matter. You have long since decided that you do not wish to discuss anything. Auf Wiedersehen. | |
Yes I did miss that point, but it was easy to do when you didn't mention it in the first place.
I'm more envisaging a co-operative relationship between government and industry, not government dictating industry. Businesses may explain their needs, and government can play a useful part in helping make its country an enticing location by ensuring the infrastructure and labour is there. Without, the businesses may as well go elsewhere: they're there to make money, not serve national interests. Even still, government also has a role to play in determining national strategy. Just as diversification of skills is useful for a worker, so diversification of industry may be useful for a country. Yet it may require some activity by government to see that happens; the free market simply cannot be relied on to accomplish it. And as several countries found out 5 years ago, over-reliance on certain industries can prove painful.
It depends on what the job wanting to be done is. I agree that the fashionable drive towards academic-style learning and degrees has been neither best practice nor appropriate for many students. Splitting students up into academic or more practical/vocational education streams to help them get the best out of themselves would be preferable. | |
Honestly, if we want to compete as a country, we're going to have to bite the bullet and deal with public subsidizing of education. Other countries did it, and that's, in no small part, why they're overtaking us. We can no longer afford the luxury of making education an elite only thing, when other countries are making their basic citizens elite. | |
I talked about flooding the market, I talked about how increasing the number of mediocre engineers would not help anything, I talked about oversaturation, etc. All the elements of my argument were there, they just needed to be put together. This is where reading in between the lines comes into play. You stated the obvious, "the nature of humanity is that most people are average", and because that is obvious (and we have talked many times) you can assume that I know it and because you did not present a larger argument stating the obvious accomplished nothing. Nothing I said was particularly remarkable in light of what I had said earlier and you should have been able figure it out.
Still does not change anything. As I said before there are a lot of smart people in government. Even if government and industry worked close together on the project it still does not change the fact that you are trying to predict the future. We will need more engineers by 2020. Government subsidizes engineering degrees. Lots of engineers flood the market too early, too late, or just right. The government stops subsidizing the degrees. The next generation of engineers has to pay more and a "shortage" comes again. In other words the end result will be a perpetual line of tinkering and changing of the dynamic without any actual improvement. I think Calvin Coolidge said it best- "Four-fifths of all our troubles would disappear, if we would only sit down and keep still."
Why not? The free market makes the market as powerful as it is. A hundred thousand small businesses working towards their own ends creates far more wealth than a central bureaucracy can demand. Market forces create market diversity, we need engineers so the people who want to get a degree go and get it because it pays well. That is a market force. The government subsidizing home ownership is NOT a market force and is in fact anti-free market. Historically government has done more to destroy economies through perpetual tinkering than they have helped (if I hear any more about the monetization efforts of the Roman Empire I am going to go insane). In fact most of the "help" they have provided is fixing problems that occurred through their own incompetence. Out of a 100,000 business owners some of them are going to be bad, some of them are going to be good, and some of them are going to be great. In the end it all balances out. Government, being a single force, cannot perform an action on itself. Therefore governmental economic interventions of the sort you are talking about are like Aeolus using the different winds one at a time to balance a knife, point down, on a board. Eventually the west wind is going to push the blade a little too far and the blade will fall over. | |
Maybe give tax breaks to American businesses to employ students in the field they choose, like an internship, and the business covers the cost of schooling. Kids get on-the-job learning and classroom learning, businesses get some help, and this way the kids will be able to evaluate sooner if it is a field they are really interested in. | |
But look at all the governments successes in direct economic intervention! The subsidy ten billion we dump into America's farm industry has made unhealthy corn syrup cheaper than sawdust and stunted growth in many other farming based nations, didn't prevent a ton of solar companies from going bankrupt, and made us completely dependent on gasoline! ...Ok, maybe directly handing money to companies are a bad idea... how about from government sponsored industries! :D Fannie Mae and Freedie Mac completely ruined the economy by getting banks to makes metric tons of bad loans... Ummm... how about our successes with tariffs! :D Such as the increase that crashed the market in 1929... ... Why am I giving tax dollars to these people? | |
Humans not having telepathy and so being unable to discern the contextual thoughts behind what someone writes, in fact it is much harder to discern intended meaning than commonly thought. It's also nicer for the ego, being less psychologically uncomfortable to think the problem is all the other's person's failings rather than our own. You should try a PhD - it's a real eye-opener to how imprecisely we can express ourselves in casual conversation. I could run through the many ways I thought you might mean different things, but it would be very tedious for both of us, hardly matters, and don't wish to another bout of your hectoring for supposed intellectual shortcomings.
Do you think Ford, Pfizer and many other companies do not have long-term strategic plans trying to look many years into the future? "Failure to prepare is preparing to fail.", etc. The concept that the free market is maximally efficient and solves all ills is an theoretical, ideological assertion with no adequate evidential basis. I'm just going to shortcut the futility, say I and the bulk of humanity professional and laymen don't agree and leave it there. | |
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Speaking as a Liberal Graduate Student I really think that ignoring a societies need for intellectuals will not help anything. Besides my 2nd language is German and combined with my history and political science majors I think I would be rather beneficial to the US. After all a man who can speak the language of one of the most industrialized countries in Europe and has the ability to understand the socio-political tensions in the area would be invaluable (stick your average person into a debate between a German/Russian and a Polish person over the Nord Stream and see how it goes).
OT- At my University (UT Austin) they could just stop spending so much and use the excess to lower tuition. My University seems more content to spend money on the football program and build new buildings than maintaining the buildings it already has. They could also start hiring some business 101 teachers to run their things. A friend of mine is a work study student and works in one of the storerooms on campus. Right now the university is trying to cut costs by cutting the storerooms available services. The storeroom apparently made over $40,000 a month for the University and provided a quick and easy area to get materials for projects. Now the storeroom is bringing in less than $30,000 and it is still dropping. Soon they are apparently going to get rid of work study students (using lower usage as an excuse) so they will probably have to cut more services (there is only so much 2 people can do in that kind of business). Plus they have already gotten rid of the Physics storeroom and parceled out all of its old stock.
In addition they are looking to enforce the "slacker rule" to try and get people out of the University faster. I understand the idea that people should try to graduate as soon as possible but then again a teacher of mine once said the "collage is like a buffet". He actually told us that most people should be an undeclared major for their first year so that they can begin to learn what they want.